Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book was developed from my PhD dissertation under the guidance of professors
Meredith Clausen, Madeleine Yue Dong, Marek Wieczorek, Daniel Abramson,
and Yomi Braester within the Department of Art History at the University of Washington.
I thank them all for giving advice, sharing insights, and providing resources
for my research, a true intellectual benefit that I can still feel strongly today. ...

A Note on Language

Modern Chinese pinyin romanization is used throughout this book to represent the
pronunciation of Chinese names and terms. English equivalents are used wherever
possible, with occasional exceptions—such as Tiananmen (literally, “Heavenly Peace
Gate”), which is well known worldwide by its romanized pinyin name. Readers may ...

Introduction

On January 8, 1976, Premier Zhou Enlai of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
died in the Beijing Hospital near historic East Chang’an Avenue.1 On the morning of
January 11, Zhou’s body, in a white hearse followed by a hundred-car motorcade, was
driven from the hospital to Babaoshan Crematorium near the terminus of West
Chang’an Avenue. ...

Chapter One: The History of Chang’an Avenue in an Urban Context

“Chang’an” means “eternal peace,” or “long peace” in a more literal translation, but
the word will immediately remind the Chinese of two of their most powerful dynasties:
the Han (202 BCE–220 CE), from which the Chinese ethnic majority acquired its
name (Hanren), and the Tang (618–907 CE), from which the overseas Chinese communities ...

Chapter Two: National versus Modern: The 1950s

In twentieth-century Chinese architecture, nationalism and modernism appeared
simultaneously. Traditional Chinese architecture of the timber structure system had
been in existence for millennia. By the Tang dynasty, it had reached maturity and produced
large-scale halls and towers of pure wooden construction. During the Northern
Song dynasty (960–1127), this system was standardized and recorded in the official ...

Chapter Three: Collective Creation: The 1964 Chang’an Avenue Planning

Chinese communists considered artistic creation a special form of social production,
one that generated spiritual and intellectual rather than material and physical
products. Deeming individualistic expression bourgeois, the socialist approach to
artistic production emphasized collective creation (jiti chuangzuo). Architecture,
comprising both material and spiritual elements, followed the socialist model. ...

Chapter Four: Modernization in a Postmodern World: The 1970s and 1980s

The 1964 Chang’an Avenue planning was the last nationwide collective creative
project in Chinese architecture before the Cultural Revolution. After that, the political
climate, with its stress on the collective spirit, eventually led to the total abandonment
of institutionalized design. All that remain of the months of hard work by the
six leading institutes in Beijing and of the heated discussions during the five-day-long ...

Chapter Five: Collage without Planning: Toward the New Millennium

While detailed plans were prepared for Chang’an Avenue with few structures
actually built before the 1990s, in the last decade of the twentieth century the thoroughfare
became crowded with monumental façades without any comprehensive
planning. Buildings of different historical styles stood side by side with new experiments
for the coming millennium, turning Chang’an Avenue into a collage. ...

Chapter Six: Chang’an Avenue and the Axes of Beijing

For more than five centuries the city of Beijing had been dominated by an imperial
north-south axis, when Chang’an Avenue started to be constructed as the east-west
thoroughfare of the socialist capital in the mid-twentieth century. As it grew during
the early decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the avenue soon overshadowed
the north-south axis. While the issue of developing an east-west axis to ...

Conclusion: Chang’an Avenue in a Global Context

The 2008 Olympics drew the world’s attention to Beijing. Many people were
impressed by the Olympic Park and the opening ceremony held in its main stadium,
popularly known as the “Bird’s Nest.” Some praised it as a masterpiece of modern art
and engineering; others pointed to the enormous quantity of high-quality steel that
went into its construction and criticized its high cost; still others saw it as a sign that ...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.